


Assassini e Machinis

by salanaland



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Afterlife, Gen, Or at least after-death, Pieces of Eden
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 16:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1148304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salanaland/pseuds/salanaland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A bit of backstory to Displaced (http://archiveofourown.org/works/1053622/). Not at all cracky, except for the crazy way their universe works. But that's just how Assassin's Creed is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Assassini e Machinis

**Author's Note:**

> Title is Latin for "Assassins from machines". 
> 
> The common phrase "deus ex machina" is exactly as wrong as saying "god from an machine". You just can't say that in Latin. You just can't! ARGH!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 750 years of being the World's Biggest Mostly-Human Nerd.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I wrote this, I had no idea I'd write a story about Desmond being crazy and traveling through time, so I wasn't sure how this piece was even going to end for months. Then I started writing Displaced, and then I realized that this was part of the backstory for it. But the tone of this piece and its focus are kind of very different and I don't think it would integrate into the larger piece well.

Where does the man end and the metal begin? Or does the metal bracket his life like his hand has so often cradled the device? Does he remember the exact moment when he is no longer in withering flesh and congealing blood, creaking bone and sparkless brain? Or has he ever been there, has he always been a firefly of bits, a digital eagle swooping down on massive vistas of proliferating knowledge? Facts and numbers, equations and theorems, the intellectual achievement of his people that will remake the world in the image of others, are but rough sketches of the truths he breathes when his ribs move no more.

No dry wind or dusty sunrise can shake him loose, now, from his dizzying dive through the bedrock of existence. No small, calloused hand will again free him from the marvels of study in favor of the decidedly analog pleasures of flesh and time; he is eternal, subsumed in the timelessness of the brain trap within, no longer possessed by electrical meat demanding glucose, water, attention paid to urgent signals from its failing frame.Contemplating feathers of stone and the gait of long-vanished four-footed birds, their secrets to be hidden beneath the flaming cliffs of frigid deserts for centuries still, he notices not the subtle thump of circulation, the pulse in the hands he had foreseen--or he had told himself--the pronouns swirl in a welter of confusion--these hands the first to touch him since the nine shriveled fingers he had once held some attachment to.  And now his prison, his wisdom, his escape, is returned to its resting place, but he leaps into another that moves across a continent, entombed now in a cave not made by hands like his own. Secured, he is only dimly aware of these hands of flesh and blood--so much--and the apparition that guides them. Flesh of their flesh, past and future, lost until safe to be found.And those hands, too, wither like forgotten grapes on the vine, and around them, the invisible clutches of memories of men they will never see, recorded in four letters of intricately patterned energy and retrieved by the clumsy two note song of travelers on the road paved by wise men they both have known, clasp and venerate deeds they forgot when the sparks died behind their gold-flashing eyes. While swirled metal still holds one, the other waits to sing once again in sand strung with copper, to bring knowledge of knowledge, life from the lifeless. To sneak, to delve, to expose, to paint in the medium of light itself.

  
At last, five and then ten, warmth to his cold metal. The thoughts that sprout from combining gear and cell, switch and seed, kite and idea and jar and time, at last bear fruit, and he is alive again, lossy, a four note melody flattened to binary, but the right (bloody) hands (gagged by the horror of their half-intentional deed) bring him to the wrong, or right, cave. These hands are the product of this cave, he understands, and of the creature that once held his thoughts, and they reunite the two--three--lines once again, pressing his golden skin into the waiting orifice, the closest thing to brute carnality he has felt for centuries. The only thing he has felt for centuries.

He dissolves, but he expands, knowing that he is but an unintended passenger, traveling through time by dint of ancient computer hidden by violent cult; now, seeping into carved rock and fractured stone, he flashes through veins of metal and nerves constructed by machines constructed by machines long ago, and for the first time in centuries, he sees. He sees only within himself, for he  _is_ the temple, every step and every wall, the air that echoes and the menace that waits. He watches her, lurking in her prison, listening to the melodies of electrons, and he knows how to free her and how to cage her, the djinn in the lamp of death.

  
 

And he sees as she sees, as the apple in the fable must have seen. He sees her plans, needing those who inherit her powers. She passes down few enough: eyes like the apple, like he once had before he became it. And something else, something totally foreign to him.He understands  _mutation_ after finding within the streams of numbers the answers he wishes he could forget: why small children sometimes lost their wits, and died, and why death ate their mothers from the inside out, from breast and belly to the wailing of widowers and orphans; why white foals could not hear nor eat; why children of the strongest men and women from Africa turned blue; why dogs could eat bread; why a whole family could suffer from fits, or odd-eyes, a white forelock, severe melancholia, or the kind of speech impediment that provoked such amusement in those who felt superior to country folk the world around.This  _mutation_ gives the caged woman, and her line, a power entirely unusual among those--like himself--who can count her species among their forebears. This unusual power, however, can only help her--and him, did he have it, did he want it. She has the power to  **manifest.** To will herself into being, an algorithm so simple it can be engraved as a snake on a bauble, so subtle it could diffuse from metal to neuron over decades if given the opportunity. The knowledge of her body is the knowledge needed to open her cell, but useless inside--he relishes the irony.

  
He knew before any living white-haired sockless philanderer that everything solid is just infinitesimal packets of wiggling potential, with vast wastelands of void in between. And she can wrestle the nothing and the lightning into  _something--_ herself--a bomb that implodes from entropy into order, a whirlwind that builds a tower, a tsunami that deposits a village pristine upon the beach, time unwinding itself to remake her. Hence the elaborate oubliette, the key kept half a world away, to keep her from wreaking her designs upon the world.

But enough of her touch has reached out to call her people to her, over millennia, her descendants and all their families, and her favorites she led to build a village nearby--until a fire, and a war, and rapacity, and abandonment. And he knows that another line like his has merged with hers: a boy bereaved, deceived, warped and ruined, merely that he could steal the key she needed, bring it to this continent, and love one with her quiescent powers, exulting as they made their child in the shadow of this very cave. And then strife, to get a trinket from father to son, to hide it in memories written only in the body. What a waste of life, the boy orphaning himself in rage and hate. What a waste of her blood, her people, pruning overmuch the family tree--it is now his orchard as much as hers, and he would rather a wild profusion of unruly descendants than this single thread to bear all their hopes, converging and dissimilar both. But he knows she rears it only to reap, a harvest of blood and energy to rival the birth of the universe--nothing less could bring her the material body she craves.

 

And he, he watches the boy, the man whose hands bore him here. Submitting to torture, the crude device that shears neurons as it unpacks memories compressed into every cell, by friends he had never met before and did not choose, and family he doesn't trust. When the ghost--spirit--phantasm filters into the off-on-off flicker of the machine, he sees the pain etched across his descendant's every second, the exhaustion and despair of those who bequeathed their memories, and when the boy reaches for the key, the affinity between them--mind and metal--makes the briefest twist in the universe. Drawing lightning from the wall, he pours it into the fault, catapulting his descendant through into the glow triggered by the contact of fingers to artifact.

 

Rest. The boy needs rest, and care, a hospice for the heart. Blighted by his strengths, he is burdened by sorrows so long past that the hearts that ached and wept with them have blown away on the wind as motes of dust--or broken down and been reborn as trees--or been buried beneath concrete, awaiting demolition and archaeologists to be revealed.


End file.
